Felix Marnewecke
1972 — 2024

Felix Marnewecke died on Easter Monday, 1 April 2024, from typhoid fever contracted on a bongo hunt in the Bongo forests of Cameroon. He was fifty-one years old. He had survived an earlier ambush by a Cape buffalo only to die from a treatable, preventable bacterial illness while being transported to a hospital in Douala.

Felix was my professional hunter for the 2012, 2013 and 2014 Nyae Nyae safaris, and in the entries you will read on this site it is his voice — his quiet Namibian German economy, his read of the wind, his refusal to sweet-talk a client into a bull that wasn't worth it — that sets the pace of every day. "He does not give you any sweet talk, give you BS, nor sell dreams," I wrote after the 2012 season. That was the whole of him.

Felix was a trustee of Hunters United Against Poaching (HUAP), a Namibian conservation organisation that channels licensed trophy-hunting communities into direct anti-poaching action. Several of the bulls we passed up in Nyae Nyae — bulls that would have been legal, and that a commercial PH might have pushed a client to take — are almost certainly still alive, somewhere between the Botswana border and the Khaudum fence, because of the way Felix hunted.

Our goal is success, but the total hunting experience and camaraderie in the great African bush is the ultimate reward.

Felix made that sentence possible. These journals are set down with him as their silent co-author.